Tasmanian Wildlife Expert Admits: "We Were WRONG" — The Tasmanian Tiger Footage That Split Experts

In 1986, fifty years after the last captive animal died in Hobart, the International Union for Conservation of Nature formally declared the Tasmanian tiger extinct. The file was closed. In 2023, a team at the University of Tasmania finished assembling every thylacine record ever filed on the island. 1,237 of them, going back to 1910. Then they ran the numbers, and the numbers split in half. Restrict the models to physical specimens only and you get the textbook answer: extinction before 1940. Include the sightings from trappers, bushmen, wildlife officers and the public, weighted by reliability, and the most likely extinction date moves to the late 1990s. Same team. Same database. Two answers, sixty years apart. Then they mapped it, cell by cell across the whole island, and watched the animal retreat into a single band of wilderness running from Lake Pedder to the Tarkine. The upper confidence bounds of that map, in some of those regions, have still not closed. This is the story of a search that spent forty years pointing at the wrong island. SOURCES Brook BW, Sleightholme SR, Campbell CR, Jarić I, Buettel JC (2023). Resolving when (and where) the Thylacine went extinct. Science of the Total Environment 877:162878. DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162878 Tasmanian Thylacine Sighting Records Database (TTSRD), University of Tasmania Sleightholme SR & Campbell CR (2016). A retrospective assessment of 20th century thylacine populations. Australian Zoologist 38:102-129 Guiler ER (1985). Thylacine: The Tragedy of The Tasmanian Tiger. Oxford University Press IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Thylacinus cynocephalus Opening footage courtesy of the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia (October 2016, Adelaide Hills, South Australia) Music 'Discovery' by Scott Buckley – released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au 'Within Our Nature' by Scott Buckley – released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au